"When you're alone And life is making you lonely,
You can always go downtown When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry Seems to help, I know, downtown..."

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

favorite alexandria penthouse memories

I wish blogger existed back in 1991 when I first moved downtown, to South Park. Or when I first moved into the Alexandria nine years ago. I've managed to write about a few events and characters I've run across and interacted with, but it was nothing like the first few years.

We used to throw huge parties in the penthouse. Imagine having a thousand people over at your house for a party that didn't end until the sun came up. The first party I threw with my new loftmates resulted in one guy throwing himself off my roof and impaling himself on a parking meter on 5th Street. My then-boss saw him jump. A co-worker at the time was in his car, waiting to get into my parking garage when the body hit the ground. He called me and I was in my bedroom answering the phone when another co-worker ran in and said, "Celia, someone just jumped off your roof". The cops came, interviewed the witnesses, about 50 of them, in my bedroom while the party raged on outside. I asked the cops if I should break up the party. They said no emphatically, smoked my cigars and hit on my girlfriends while conducting the investigation. Multi-taskers, all of them. The last reveler left the party around 6AM. The security guard stationed outside Charley O's when the body dropped quit the next day.

We've had lots of parties since where we didn't have a body count, but that seems to be the one that people remember most. Even more than the one where about people on the dance floor took their clothes off. The security guards tried to get them to put their clothes back on, until jet-set roommate and I told them it was okay. Even more than the vintage porn projected onto neighboring abandoned buildings, people remember the party with the dead guy.

Chris the Magician moved out so that I could move in. He took his pet pig, snakes, rats, and cages full of crows with him. I remember pulling up to the curb to move stuff in, just as he was trying to get the pig in his car.

Jet-set roommate Kedric had been there almost a year when I moved in. He wasn't jet-set back then. As I wrote out the check to loftmate Bob, he promised that he wouldn't run around the place naked now that I was moving in. I assured him I didn't want him to change his behavior just on my account. I've never seen him naked. But I did hear his ex-girlfriends Emily and Helena fake orgams badly from out in the hallway, but not at the same time. Ah, Emily. Now she was crazy.

Sculptor Taft Green lived there at the time. He was always in his room, or in one of the five artists' studios, or in our living room working on a sculptureor something. I've run into Taft at the Bounty, I wonder if he gets nostalgic for the penthouse.

I'm sure more memories will come to mind as the month progresses. I'll try to scribble them down as I pack.

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About Me

“An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
- William Faulkner